Category: Food & Drink

If the food feature on page 44 has whet your appetite, check out the fourth annual New Year Festival presented by the Greater Memphis United Chinese Association Saturday, January 28th, at the University of Memphis.

The event will include two performances showcasing Chinese dance and music at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. at the Rose Theatre. After each show, samples of traditional New Year’s fare will be provided at the University Center. There will also be karaoke, ballroom dancing, and Chinese movies. Tickets for the festival are $8 to $15 and include the food. For tickets, call 452-0188 or 462-3084. Tickets can also be purchased at the door.

On Sunday, February 19th, at 6:30 p.m., the association will host its annual New Year’s banquet fund-raiser at the China Inn Restaurant at 2820 Covington Pike. For $50 per person (or $400 for a table of 10), you get eight courses of Chinese specialties. The meal is served family-style, so if you aren’t coming with your own family, be prepared to make new friends. For tickets, call China Inn Restaurant at 383-8211.

cnyf.memphischinese.com

Chocolate lovers, this one’s for you: the Chocolate Fantasy Weekend, presented by the National Kidney Foundation of West Tennessee. The three-day event begins at 7 p.m. Friday, January 27th, at Encore with a dinner and auction featuring a special menu created by Jose Gutierrez. Auction items include chocolate gift packages and a private tasting with Chloe Doutre-Roussel, a London-based buyer, taster, and author of The Chocolate Connoisseur. Tickets are $125 per person.

It was Doutre-Roussel who helped recruit other experts for the “Chocolate Academy,” a new, daylong event being held at The Peabody on Saturday, January 28th, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The academy will feature a demonstration by pastry chef Andre Renard of the Sug’Art Artistic School and lectures by Frederick Schilling, founder of the socially conscious Dagoba Organic Chocolates, and Steve DeVries, owner of DeVries Chocolate, plus much more. Tickets are $125.

Also on Saturday, at Oak Court Mall from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., is the Chocolate Fantasy Chocolate Tasting. Now in its 22nd year, the event draws more than 1,000 people and features samples from 31 vendors, including Godiva, Cafe Toscana, and City Bakery. Tickets are $16 in advance and $18 on the day of the event.

Closing out the weekend is a Sunday brunch at Encore at 11 a.m. Tickets are $50.

For more information, call the Kidney Foundation at 683-6185.

On Tuesday, January 31st, from 5 to 9 p.m., it’s Celebrity Waiter Night at Boscos Squared, a fund-raiser for the Ronald McDonald House. Among the celebrity waiters are the Memphis Grizzlies dancers, Rock 103’s Wake-Up Crew, and Rocky the Redbird. For more information, call 432-2222.

The theme is “Icy Hot” at this month’s Tuesday on the Terrace, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Memphis Botanic Garden. The wine tasting will feature gluhwein, a hot wine punch, as well as champagne and iced wines. Tickets are $20 for Botanic Garden members, $30 for nonmembers. Call 685-1566, ext. 107, to make reservations.

Also on Wednesday, February 1st, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Miss Cordelia’s, there’s a Wine Tasting Showdown. Participants will be given a scorecard and asked to rank a selection of six wines. The cost is $10, which includes samples of breads from local baker Sheri McKelvie and imported cheeses. Call 526-4772 for more information.

Years ago, I happened to arrive in San Francisco on the day my calendar said “Chinese New Year.” Naturally, I headed for Chinatown, expecting to see all sorts of craziness and get a great dinner.

Instead, the place was a ghost town — absolutely closed. What kind of New Year celebration is this, I wondered? Well, it turns out everybody was at home — eating.

When most Americans think of Chinese New Year, they envision parades, dragons, and fireworks. But for thousands of years, food and family have been at the heart of a 15-day celebration of the new year.

First, a few words about the calendar. The traditional Chinese calendar is based on both the moon and the sun. Since a lunar “month” is about 29.5 days, they add an extra month about seven times each 19 years, meaning the date of the new year changes every solar year. This time around, Chinese Year 4704 starts on January 29th.

In traditional China, this event would kick off a celebration that is all about family, community superstition, and food. It ends with the Lantern Festival, highlighted by the dancing-dragon parade which, in America, is always held conveniently on the first weekend after the new year begins.

The communal New Year’s Eve feast, known as “surrounding the stove,” invites the spirits of ancestors to be honored. Fireworks are shot off at midnight to chase off the old year and make way for the new.

After that, each day has its own traditions, many focused on food, and many of the foods are chosen because of what they sound or look like.

What’s served at a New Year’s Eve feast might depend on which part of China you’re from. In south China, it would be nian gao (sticky-sweet glutinous rice pudding) or zong zi (glutinous rice wrapped up in reed leaves), while in the north you’d have steamed dumplings called jiaozi or steamed-wheat bread called man tou.

The next day, people abstain from meat to ensure long and happy lives. The traditional meal is a vegetarian dish called jai or Buddha’s Delight. Among its roughly 30 ingredients are lotus seed (for many male offspring), ginkgo nut (representing silver ingots, or wealth), black moss seaweed (a Chinese homonym that sounds like “rich”), dried bean curd (a homonym for “fulfillment of wealth and happiness”), and bamboo shoots (“wishing that everything would be well”).

Apparently, it’s easy to make Buddha’s Delight — once you assemble all the ingredients. So if you can find some black tree-ear fungus, dried snow fungus, bean-curd stick, bamboo piths, dried mung-bean thread, Chinese cabbage, and both black and straw mushrooms, knock yourself out.

On the celebration’s seventh day, farmers display their produce and make a drink from seven types of vegetables. The seventh day is also considered the birthday of human beings, so everyone eats uncut noodles for longevity and raw fish for success.

Day eight brings another family-reunion dinner, plus a midnight prayer to the God of Heaven. Days 10 through 12 are all about inviting friends and family for more eating. Among the traditional foods might be a whole fish to represent togetherness and abundance or a whole chicken — head, feet, everything — to represent completeness. Mmmm, chicken head …

Spring rolls symbolize wealth, because their shape is similar to gold bars. Plenty of lettuce is eaten because the word for lettuce sounds like “rising fortune.” The words for tangerines and oranges sound like “luck” and “wealth.”

The word for fish sounds like the words for “wish” and “abundance,” and it’s served whole to represent the end (tail) of the old year and the start (head) of the new.

Sticky rice cake stands for a rich, sweet life, as well as rising abundance for the coming year — the higher the cakes rise, the better the year. And the round shape signifies family reunion.

After all this stuffing, on Day 13 the Chinese take a break by eating only rice porridge and mustard greens to cleanse the system. On Day 14 they get ready for the next day’s Lantern Festival, during which everyone lights lanterns and eats yuanxioa, a sweet or savory dumpling made from glutinous rice flour that is either boiled or fried.

I got to thinking how Americans might translate some of these traditions to our food culture. I can see us eating lots of “rich” foods, downing bowls of Lucky Charms, eating out of sacks because it sounds like “sex,” and who knows what kind of goofiness? I suppose it’s best we have parades and leave the food to the experts.

All roads lead to Memphis. Case in point: restaurateurs/caterers Ira and Stephanie Siegel, who stopped to see Graceland while on their way to New Mexico. They’d sold their house in Palm Beach, Florida, because they couldn’t face another hurricane season and were planning on moving to Santa Fe. The Memphis layover, however, turned into a relocation.

“We just liked it here,” Stephanie says. “Everybody was very helpful, and after talking to the Chamber of Commerce and the Center City Commission about our catering business, things took off.”

I. Siegel Culinary Productions of Memphis, located on South Main in the former spot of Memphis Grits, is a special-events company that does high-end, high-volume catering for everything from executive breakfasts to large-scale themed events. In addition, Culinary Productions recently started offering lunch to the public.

“We live just down the street from the kitchen, and, for dinner, Ira would often grill on the rooftop [of our building]. The neighbors would join us, so Ira kept on cooking for a few more people. We thought, Why don’t we do this in our catering kitchen and open for lunch?” Stephanie says.

And that’s what they did. There’s a $10 special every day — flank steak might be on the menu for Mondays, Fridays might be salmon — and the menu changes every week. The setup for lunch includes a salad bar, soup, dessert, soft drinks, and iced tea. Lunch hours are 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

I. Siegel Culinary Productions, 22 S. Main (523-1772)

Ed Dunkel, owner of Bittersweet Restaurant in Germantown, is another transplant. He moved to Memphis because he was fed up with the annual mountains of snow in his New Hampshire backyard. Dunkel’s sister is a FedEx pilot, and when he came to visit, he liked it so much he sold the New Hampshire Bittersweet Restaurant and opened the one in Germantown.

Bittersweet Restaurant is an upscale-casual steak and seafood restaurant that specializes in coldwater seafood. On the menu are salmon Oscar (derived from the traditional veal Oscar) and the restaurant’s signature lobster pie. The restaurant is open for lunch Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and for dinner nightly.

Bittersweet Restaurant, 7685 Farmington Blvd. (624-9499)

Moe El-Zein came to Memphis from Detroit a little over a month ago and took over Boogey’s Bistro on Cleveland, which now is called Al-Rayan. The food, according to El-Zein, is the same Lebanese fare, only better. You can be the judge of that every day from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Al-Rayan, 288 N. Cleveland (272-0227)

Around the corner another name change: Pho Pasteur is now Pho Vietnam, but it didn’t change owners or menu — just the name and the location. The popular restaurant has moved from its Cleveland location in a strip mall to a larger, stand-alone building on Poplar at Watkins.

Pho Vietnam, 1411 Poplar (728-4711)

The Flying Saucer Draught Emporium is expanding too. Its second location is scheduled to open on January 21st on Germantown Parkway in Cordova. What to expect? A never-ending supply of draughts in the usual Saucer atmosphere.

Flying Saucer Draught Emporium,1400 N. Germantown Parkway, Suite 114 (755-5530)

Chef Edward Nowakowski is up to his armpits in the bounty of a good hunt: Ducks, pheasants, quail, antelope, deer, boar, and a veritable school of trout, pike, and salmon are stuffed into every nook and cranny of his University of Memphis kitchen, hanging from meat hooks, packed into the industrial-sized freezer, and steeping in beer baths that fill the fridge.

Nowakowski, chef at the university’s Holiday Inn, Fogelman Executive Center, and FedEx Institute of Technology, couldn’t be happier.

This week, the Austria-born, Poland-raised immigrant will spend three days sorting through his stock provided by area hunters, local game retailer Cassidy Fine Foods, and South Dakota suppliers Pheasant Express and Steamboat Fish and Game.

After cleaning and separating the meat, he’ll whisk his marinades, whip together a dozen patés and terrines, and finally get down to business: grilling, roasting, and stewing a few hundred pounds of meat for the estimated 400 diners who will attend Opera Memphis’ Deers, Beers & 50 Years Wild Game Dinner, held at the Holiday Inn this Friday.

In the Mid-South, wild game is a low-cost staple for rural residents, who live off venison sausage and stews made from deer they kill themselves. At high-end restaurants like KC’s in Cleveland, Mississippi, and Memphis’ Erling Jensen, game is also a commodity that commands top dollar. Chefs like Nowakowski , who used to cook and eat game out of necessity — he remembers trapping wild boars in pits in his native village of Nienadona, Poland, during a self-described period of “rough times” after World War II — bridge the gap between both worlds, incorporating peasant know-how with all the elements of haute cuisine.

Nowakowski will cook dozens of specialties this weekend, including a Hunter’s Venison Stew with Porter, saturated in a marinade of diced celery and onion, bay leaves, and a bottle of Anchor Steam. “You get more flavor with marinades, which can be heightened with the addition of juniper berries or ginger,” he says, adding that you generally need to include acid, in the form of citrus juice or balsamic vinegar, to eliminate bacteria and increase the quality of the meat.

“People aren’t generally used to eating wild game,” he notes. “It’s more lean than other meat. These animals weren’t grain-fed, and they exercised a lot more than a farm-raised cow or chicken.”

If you’re cooking game at home, he explains, you must clean the animal as soon as it’s killed, removing inner organs with a surgeon’s precision. Before marinating, you must de-bone the meat and remove all veins; while cooking, you need to make sure the meat reaches an internal temperature of 176 degrees for 30 minutes.

Before tackling a wild animal on your own, however, you might want to attend the Opera Memphis dinner to see what meat you prefer.

Anneliese Hill Tyler, chairperson of the wild game fund-raiser, says that the event is a big draw for “foodies, politicos [Shelby County mayor A C Wharton serves as the honorary host], and hunters,” as well as opera supporters. “We pull in all types,” she says, “so we have to include a few mild dishes, like pasta, chicken, or fish.”

It’s also an informal occasion: Casually dressed guests (blue jeans and animal prints are de rigueur, says Tyler) will serve themselves from three buffet stations, then sup at tables festooned with camouflage fabric and camp lanterns. Opera Memphis’ artistic director, Michael Ching, will make a few announcements, then bluegrass band Sorghum Hill will provide down-home entertainment for the dinner, which costs $125 per person.

“This is my heritage,” Nowakowski happily proclaims. “In the old days in Poland, I would’ve been out hunting wild boars.

“I’ve been a chef nearly all my life, cooking a lot of dishes,” he continues, “but nowhere I’ve been have I been able to cook much wild game. This dinner brings me quite a lot of pleasure.”

What started as the organic food movement is now a $15-billion-per-year industry, filled with all the government regulation and business intrigue of any other market segment. But for winemaker Gilbert Heller, it’s much more personal than that.

“It’s our mission in life,” says Heller, owner of Heller Estate in Carmel Valley, California. “When you put pesticides on your crops, those pesticides go into your body, and into your children’s bodies, and your grandchildren’s bodies. There’s no reason for it. We believe in the organic lifestyle.”

Heller, who has made wines for 45 years, will be in Memphis on January 18th to spread the word about organic growing and to introduce people to his wines during a dinner at Jim’s Place East.

When Heller bought his vineyard in 1994, he set out to have it certified as organic — an arduous four-year process which, he says, only half a dozen vineyards in California have completed.

“For example, we planted French plum trees, which play host to predatory wasps,” he says. “The wasps eat the eggs of insects we don’t want on the vines. We also bring in vineyard spiders to attack other insects.”

Such is Heller’s dedication that the winery steam-cleans the tires of cars and trucks that come from non-organic vineyards.

Heller uses 100 percent organically raised grapes to create his wines, and the results are no novelty product. The London Times gave favorable reviews, and The New York Times restaurant critic came for a visit after being impressed by Heller’s wines at a Manhattan restaurant.

“I have been very pleased with the recent quality and quantity of organically produced wines now available,” says Kevin Weaver, national wine buyer for Wild Oats Markets. “The quality of these wines is there and should be celebrated.”

The dinner’s host, Victor Robilio, who is president of the wine importer Victor L. Robilio Co., sees organics as playing an ever-larger part in the future wine industry.

“It’s coming on strong,” he says. “As grape growers find out that people want these products, you’ll see a swing in that direction. Whatever the public wants — even if it costs a little more — the industry will provide. And the quality is good. You don’t lose any thickness of the body or the bouquet; what you probably have is a less heavy taste.”

Marne Anderson, Robilio’s general manager, says that healthier wines make for healthier sales.

“With the organics, you get a purer concept of the grape varietal itself, rather than tainting it with herbicides,” she says. “From a business perspective, there’s such a glut of good-quality wines right now, it’s nice to have something that has a unique selling appeal.”

For Gilbert Heller, though, it’s still very simple: “Organics is the future of the food industry. It costs a little more, but it’s our mission in life. We’re here to run a vineyard and make money, but we’re also doing it the right way.”

Holiday parties — especially those with crappy food and drink — can really suck. But, like a bird that strategically aims its business for a clean car, a carefully plopped comment can make anyone raise an eyebrow or chuckle. I’ve compiled a list of completely geeky, useless wine facts to drop on unsuspecting bores, if only to entertain yourself.

• Studies have shown that the more you know about wine, the better experience you will have with it. In brain experiments while consuming the juice, experts showed activity in the frontal cortex — where memory and emotion are processed — while the laymen did not. Moral: Drink more wine, and you too can have increased brain activity.

• Two out of three bottles of wine sold in the U.S. are from California. Take that, snobby French.

• There are over 3,500 wineries in the United States — and apparently growing by the day in no-longer-so-scenic Napa Valley. Can anyone say Disneyland?

• Vineyard land in Napa Valley now goes for $100,000 acre, with prime locations selling for over $200,000.

• The next new trend out of Australia is wine in a can. Try to think of vending machines without shivering with anticipation.

• The United Kingdom is the largest importer of American wines, with other big markets including the Netherlands, Germany, France, Ireland, and Denmark. So the Brits do have taste after all.

• Costco is the country’s leading retailer of wine, selling more than $598 million worth of wine in 2002.

• In 2004, red wine edged out white wine sales for the first time in recent history. The health-benefit report has been heard, ladies and gentlemen.

• Slovenia is purported to have the oldest grapevine in the world, at 400 years. The Zametovka vine still produces 77 to 121 pounds of grapes per year, enough to make 100 eight-ounce bottles.

• Lightly chilling a red wine will make it taste less astringent and tannic. If you serve it around 65 degrees — the original “room temperature” — the wine will taste more balanced than when served at 78 degrees, the current version of room temperature.

• Wine is produced in every state in the United States. It’s not all drinkable, but it’s available. The best wines that I’ve tried, outside of California and New York, can be found in New Mexico, Texas, North Carolina, and Virginia.

• The cork oak tree takes 40 to 45 years before a sapling can produce a stopper thick and consistent enough for wine. And, like a tourist, it prefers sunny, mild climates.

• The wire cage on a Champagne bottle is called a “muselet” and comes from the French word “to muzzle.”

• White wine gets red wine stains out, if poured on the spot immediately after a spill. I’ve tried it. It works.

• My favorite drinking toasts:

“To lying, cheating, stealing, and drinking — may you lie to save your brother, may you cheat death, may you steal someone’s heart, and may you drink with me.”

“Friendship’s the wine of life. Let’s drink of it and to it.”

Happy partying.

Recommended Wines

Oberon 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley) — Smooth, elegant texture, black-pepper spicy, rich dark cherry, chocolaty, and most certainly decadent. Amazing deal on a very high-quality Cabernet from the famed Napa Valley. $19

Palandri 2004 Sauvignon Blanc Boundary Road SE (Australia) — A simple, drinkable Sauv Blanc from down under with hints of green grass and lime. An everyday wine. $10

Of all the weird things that will happen at midnight on December 31st, imagine this: All over Spain, people will gather around the radio, each making sure they have 12 grapes on hand. The radio will broadcast live from the Plaza del Sol in Madrid, and as the plaza’s clock strikes midnight, millions of Spaniards will try to eat one grape per chime for good luck.

Why? Well, that’s an open question. So is the German habit of eating herring at midnight. Ditto for the Poles’ preference for their midnight herring to be pickled. And heaven only knows why Venezuelans consider yellow underwear a lucky thing to wear while they’re eating their dozen grapes, but they do.

Buddhist monks eat noodles at midnight. The Pennsylvania Dutch eat pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day. Danes eat boiled cod on New Year’s Eve. The Dutch start the year with olie bollen, a donutlike fritter made with apples, raisins, or dried currants and dusted with powdered sugar. Well, actually, that makes perfect sense.

Koreans eat ttok-kuk, a rice cake in a thick beef broth topped with bright garnishes and green onions. The name means “adding age,” and people believe if they have a bowl of this soup, they will become one year older. Koreans, you see, traditionally add one to their age on New Year’s, not their birthdays.

For some traditions, there’s at least a hint of reasoning or a good story. The Greeks eat vasilopita, a cake with a coin inside, to commemorate the return of their money (via a miracle of Saint Basil) from the tax-and-spend Ottoman Empire. Whoever bites into the coin gets the good luck for the new year.

Across the way in Italy, they eat cotechino con lenticchie — pork sausage (a symbol of bounty because they’re rich in fat) served over lentils (which are green and shaped like money) — and then they throw old stuff they don’t want out the window to make way for new stuff during the New Year. No doubt there’s some vino involved in this particular tradition.

Unlike most of Asia, Japan celebrates the New Year (which they call shogatsu) at the same time we do, but they stretch it out over three days. They have “year-forgetting parties,” eat toshikoshi soba (buckwheat noodles symbolizing longevity), fly kites, and play cards and badminton.

Japan’s main food tradition stems from the fact that stores and restaurants close for all three days, so people have to make food ahead of time. Thus was born osechi-ryori. Ever efficient, the Japanese cook many different dishes — sake-steamed shrimp, rolled kelp with fish, sweet black beans, teriyaki dried sardines, daikon, pickled carrot, herring roe — and store them in lacquered boxes called jubako, which can be stacked, chilled, or frozen to last until January 4th.

Scotland — particularly Edinburgh — is one of the places to be on New Year’s Eve. The celebration is called Hogmanay, and as many as 200,000 people gather in the town center for concerts, feasting, general partying, and, this year, a 150-person human tower.

The Scots also have a food-related tradition called first-footing, which means that the first foot to cross your door in the New Year will set the tone for the year. Custom holds that a tall, dark man is best (no doubt a custom started by women), but apparently new brides, new mothers, and anyone whose birthday is January 1st are also prized. People go around visiting each other and bringing gifts of shortbread, tea, a black bun cake, a seed cake (with caraway seeds), or a lump of coal. Yes, coal. It’s cold in Scotland on New Year’s Eve.

And then there’s the black-eyed pea. Being people of the South, you know this: Eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day is good luck. Do you know why? Of course not. Neither does anybody else. We do it because our mothers and grandmothers tell us to.

One theory is that it’s tied to the siege of Vicksburg, when people had to resort to eating “cowpeas,” which, before that terrible event, folks didn’t eat. So now we eat them to show solidarity, or somesuch. Other theories involve being humble (“eat poor on New Year’s, eat rich the rest of the year”) and the fact that black-eyed peas, if you eat them with cabbage, collard greens, kale, or some other green and if you’ve had enough champagne, look like little pennies next to a pile of dollars, hence good fortune for the year.

Some folks even eat 365 peas, one for each day of the year. I guess if you survive that, you can handle whatever 2006 brings. Oh, and black-eyed peas are not peas. Or beans. They’re lentils.

The most traditional way — though no one knows why — to consume black-eyed peas is in a dish called Hoppin’ John, a name of unknown origin. Some posit that the maker of the dish would say, “Hop in, John,” when it was ready. Another comes from Raymond Sokolov, former food editor of The New York Times. He said the dish goes back at least as far as 1841, when it was sold in the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, by a crippled man who was known as Hoppin’ John. Yet another theory is that a Caribbean dish called pois à pigeon (rice, peas, and salt pork) was pronounced “pwa-ha-pee-zhawn,” which sounded to English-speakers like “hoppin’ John.”

All of this matters about as much as who wins the college football bowl games we’ll all be watching on January 1st. Have a happy, well-fed New Year!

Here’s a handy retail tip: If you call Mary Carter Decorating Center on Summer Avenue, don’t ask for Mary Carter because there’s no telling who you’ll get.

Storeowners Jim and Kathy Famerty might take your call. It could be their son Chris, who’s in the business too. But one thing’s certain: Mary Carter won’t answer because she’s a paint brand, not a person.

And here’s another reminder: Don’t try buying paint at the small corner store either. The shop’s colorful merchandise is for decorating candy, cakes, and cookies, not furniture or walls.

“Paint was how we got started,” says Jim, whose father purchased a Mary Carter franchise after retiring from General Motors in 1958. The family moved to Memphis from Tupelo, locating the store in the Highland Heights neighborhood where it still operates today.

“Back then, painting was a summertime thing,” Jim recalls. “So we got into cake decorating supplies to make it through the winter.”

Until about a decade ago, when Jim stopped his interior-decorating work, the businesses existed side-by-side, offering old-fashioned customer service and the largest inventory of cake and candy decorating supplies in the Mid-South.

“We get bigger every year,” Jim says. “Grocery stores have bits and pieces of decorating supplies. But for accessories, variety, or help, people come here.”

“Our customers are like family,” adds Christy Roberts, who started working at Mary Carter 14 years ago when she was just 16. “They’ve watched me grow up.”

As if on cue, Roberts greets a customer by name and offers her a taste of a new favorite treat. “Try our tangerine bark,” she says, pulling out a Ziplock bag from behind the counter. “We can’t stop eating it.”

Customers enter Mary Carter through a back door off a small porch, making the place feel more like a cramped and friendly kitchen than a retail store. But look around, and merchandise is everywhere: displayed on counters, tucked in corners, or stacked on metal shelving six-feet high.

Want to decorate a cake for a birthday, anniversary, or holiday? Start with a pan (round, square, rectangle, sheet, bundt, cheesecake, angel food, or novelty); select a cake board (any size in Masonite, white cardboard, or covered in foil); add a filling (lemon, raspberry, strawberry, pineapple, apricot, or cream cheese); decide on candles (dinosaurs, Sponge Bob, Elmo, or a rocket ship, to name a few); find the icing (a bucket of butter cream, perhaps?); and definitely don’t forget the sugars and the sprinkles.

“People come from all over Tennessee and Arkansas to get our sugars and sprinkles. I have a lot of pride about that,” says Kathy, rattling off the selection stacked in neat glass jars. “We have little pigs, footballs, cows, stars, gingerbread men, candy canes, Christmas trees, holiday lights, and my favorite: white pearlized snowflakes.”

Other candy-making supplies are equally diverse and delectable, offering melts in different flavors (mint, butterscotch, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate, or sugar-free) and an assortment of candy molds (teapots, starfish, palm trees, cowboy hats, gingerbread house, and even baby Jesus).

“Customers love the candy molds because they are so easy to do,” says Kathy, who teaches candy-making classes in an adjoining room with a telltale sign that reads, “Chocolate is the answer to everything.”

“Melt the candy melts, pour it in molds, pop the molds in the freezer, and you’re done,” she explains.

Like many customers, Stephanie Redmond of Cordova started candy making with Peppermint Bark, a delicious holiday confection of white chocolate spiked with crunchy pieces of green and red peppermint.

“The Peppermint Bark was so easy and delicious, I got hooked,” Redmond says. “Next I did chocolate spoon molds with marshmallow flavoring. I tied them with red ribbons for quick and easy holiday gifts.”

During the holidays, employees stay busy from 8 a.m. until closing, handing out advice and encouragement for making and packaging hand-made gifts.

“The gifts our customers make are special, whether they are suckers or chocolate-covered cherries or birthday cakes, because they took time to make them for a friend or family member they care about,” Kathy says. “It’s really a love thing.”

Jim readily concurs. “Our business is all about feel-good stories of people caring and sharing. I get chill bumps talking about it.”

There was a time and a place in which Christmas wasn’t mainly about presents. In fact, there was a time when it wasn’t even about Jesus.

This isn’t going to be a lecture about the “reason for the season,” although the people in this faraway time and place eventually did celebrate the birth of Jesus. This is about how they celebrated — and what they ate and drank along the way.

You may have heard of wassail as a spiced wine, served hot. And that it is. It’s also an expression from the Saxon days in 8th-century England. It means “be in good health.” It would have been said as a greeting, farewell, or a toast — the forebear of our “to your health!” A Saxon’s response would have been drinc hail, or “drink good health.” (The word “hail,” by the way, is closely related to both our words health and hail, as in “to greet or salute.”)

Eventually, wassail came to mean the wine being consumed, especially the spiced ale or mulled wine that was shared during winter festivals. When Christianity was introduced to England, winter festivals became Christmas festivals, and on Christmas Eve and on Twelfth Night (January 6th), folks would gather to celebrate the holiday with food, wine, and song.

And, as they did before Jesus got involved, they would bless the apple orchards by putting pieces of bread, soaked in cider, in the trees and firing guns to ward off evil spirits. This piece of bread was called “toast,” and the tradition of “toasting” apple trees produced the expression “propose a toast.”

Over the years, the whole celebration came to be called wassail — there was also a verb, as in, “gather to wassail” — and in typical modern fashion the only part of the tradition that survives is the drinking. We added the shopping.

So here’s an idea of what an old wassail would look like — and then we’ll get to the wine.

In addition to the apple orchards, wassailing would happen in one’s home or as a roaming, door-to-door party in which the revelers carried a bowl of wine and offered it, along with food and song, to whoever answered the door. Take out the wine and food, and you have what we now call Christmas caroling.

The idea spread. People would wassail wheat fields, beehives, New Year’s Eve, Twelfth Night, and so on. The English, God bless ’em, were willing to wassail darn near anything.

So what where they drinking?

Coming up with a recipe for wassail is like getting one for chocolate chip cookies. Everybody has their own variation, which leads to two entertaining traditions: arguing about what goes in it and sampling some of everyone’s. The basic, traditional recipe is a hot wine, served in a wood bowl. The ingredients back in the day would have depended on where one lived, social standing and wealth, and so on. Today, there are three variations in England: Apple/Ale, Bishop, and Posset.

Apple/Ale:

A version of this less-fancy wassail is probably what was most commonly hauled around town. In a 375-degree oven, bake 1 and 1/2 pounds of cored apples for 45 minutes or until they burst. After they cool, remove the peel and mash the pulp. Heat one quart of ale in a pot, then blend in the apple pulp, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and 1/8 teaspoon each of ground ginger and nutmeg. Go to town.

Bishop:

So-called because ingredients such as citrus fruits and exotic spices would have been expensive and hard to find. Stud an unpeeled orange and/or a lemon with 12 to 18 whole cloves, then coat it thickly with brown sugar. Roast in a 350-degree oven until the sugar caramelizes into a crust. Cut the orange in quarters and place in a bowl. Simmer (in 1 cup of water) 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, a pinch each of powdered cloves and mace, 1/2 teaspoon each of allspice and ground ginger, and a strip of lemon peel. Simmer until the water is reduced by half. In a separate pot, heat 1 quart of port (or table) wine and a quarter-cup of brandy (not to boiling), then pour everything into the punch bowl and get ready to start singing.

Posset:

This is an ancestor of eggnog. Combine 1/2 cup of sugar and 1 quart of dry sherry in a saucepan. Heat but do not boil, stirring frequently until the sugar is completely dissolved. Cool. Beat 18 eggs till thin and frothy, then add to the sherry along with two quarts of milk or half and half. Forget fat grams. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until the drink coats a metal spoon. Dust with 2 teaspoons of ground nutmeg. Mmmm.

So there you have it: Christmas the old way, when people would roam around to see, toast, feed, and sing to their neighbors — a fine tradition which seems ripe for reviving. So fill yourself a bowl, make some meat pies, get out there, and wassail!

Do the Wassail, by Conrad Jay Bladey, is available at Amazon.com and answers every question imaginable about this fine tradition.

Ever wonder why you can get fresh vegetables at the store in late November? If you know a farmer or gardener in the area, you know those Thanksgiving green beans didn’t come from these parts.

Most of your winter veggies come from or through Florida. And this year if you don’t see fresh green beans at the store or if tomatoes are about $5 a pound, you have Wilma to blame.

Hurricane Wilma raked across southwest Florida — often called the winter vegetable capital of the nation — in October. Beans, peppers, tomatoes, citrus fruits, and sugar cane had just been planted or were just starting to come up. When such fields get 14 inches of rain and 100-mph winds, it doesn’t go well for the produce.

Wilma flooded fields, blew over citrus trees, knocked fruit to the ground, destroyed packing houses, and ripped apart greenhouses, tearing up tender young vegetable plants that had yet to be planted. And all the various hurricanes of 2005 have drawn labor away from picking and into cleaning up.

“It’s an agriculture disaster,” Gene McAvoy, a regional vegetable agent, told a Naples, Florida, newspaper. “It could not have come at a worse time if you planned it.”

Since southwest Florida supplies more than half the nation’s winter vegetable supply — including all its green beans — you’ll be noticing the Wilma effect at stores.

As the storm approached, there were more than 15,000 acres of vegetable plants in the ground worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Florida Agriculture commissioner Charles Bronson has estimated total damage to the state’s farms at more than $1 billion.

Among citrus crops, grapefruit took the biggest hit, with as much as 80 percent of the fruit on the ground. Some groves in the region lost more than 70 percent of their early- and mid-season oranges, and 50 to 60 percent of the Valencia crop was on the ground.

Tomatoes suffered as well. There could be a 90 percent loss of tomato production in the area because of Wilma. Other reports from Florida indicate that sweet corn, lettuce, radishes, and cucumber were wiped out by Wilma.

Farmers can replant some crops and start over — after they clean up and rebuild and find labor to help out — but even then, it will be at least a couple months before anything shows up at the stores. In the meantime, as supply shrinks, prices will go up.

Ricco Gaia, sales manager for Palazola Produce Company in Memphis, says he’s seen a big effect in the wholesale vegetable market, though in different ways from last year. “Last year tomatoes were $50 a case, when they’re usually $12. This year, the tomato market has stayed firm so far, but bell peppers, cucumbers, and green beans have tripled or quadrupled.

“Hurricanes don’t just damage the crops,” he says. “When the electricity goes out, the packing houses close down, and then people have to go to alternate places to get product. It takes weeks to get back to any kind of normalcy. Plus, shippers are out of business. A lot of things come through Florida ports from South America, so even asparagus and limes from South America are in shortage.”

As an example, Gaia says that cases of green beans, which normally go for $18, are now at $40. “We’ll see this for a few more weeks,” he predicts.

The increases will be passed on to consumers, though some might opt out of certain vegetables. Gaia says, for example, that he’s afraid to even order green beans at current prices for fear he can’t resell them to his restaurant and grocery clients.

“It’s a real volatile market — even more than oil, because our product goes bad,” he says. “We can call in the morning, get a quote, then there’s a hurricane report, and that afternoon we’ll get a different quote.”

Some local farmers might see a benefit from Wilma. Bryan Marinez, manager of the farmer’s market at the Agricenter, says that last year local growers sold wholesale tomatoes and other crops to packers in Florida to help make up for hurricane losses. Tomatoes, for example, went for about twice as much as usual. He anticipates something similar will happen this year.